1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to marketing programs, and more particularly to marketing programs for use in the gaming industry.
2. Background
Many businesses devote substantial portions of their marketing budgets to promotions aimed at gaining the attention of prospective customers. Much of this promotional spending is dedicated to advertising through various media such as television, radio, print, direct mail, e-mail, instant messaging and banner ads. Unfortunately however, prospective customers typically have little incentive to pay attention to such advertising. Low perceived benefits of reviewing advertising, combined with tools easing avoidance of advertising, have made it challenging to reach prospective customers. For example, a remote control can be used to change channels to avoid television commercials. Also, click-through rates of online banner advertising have proven to be much lower than had once been hoped. Because of these insufficient incentives, conventional advertising is largely disregarded by audiences.
In an effort to more accurately target advertising, marketers will frequently use surveys to understand the needs and desires of their customers and potential customers. However, conventional survey techniques suffer from numerous inefficiencies. Once a marketer defines a pool of survey participants, it can be very time consuming and costly to assemble the desired participants. Further, conventional survey methods do not compensate participants sufficiently so as to insure meaningful and reliable responses. It is also difficult using conventional survey techniques to provide compensation when it is most meaningful to participants and therefore, the most encouraging of sincere participation.
Conventional survey techniques are also often ineffective. Marketers do not have adequate information about the survey participants and therefore cannot make demographic-specific conclusions based on the results of the surveys. Further, in conventional techniques, marketers do not maintain an ongoing relationship with survey participants. Therefore, marketers cannot administer effective follow-up surveys based on the results of a first survey. Methods are needed for conducting surveys wherein age, demographic, financial, and other information about the survey participants is well known. Furthermore, methods are needed for administering surveys to survey participants with whom a marketer can establish an on-going relationship for the administration of follow-up surveys.